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It’s a strange and wonderful time to buy a digital camera. Since smartphones have gutted the casual photography market, manufacturers are focusing on building technological marvels designed for very specific uses. Mirrorless cameras continue to improve in terms of autofocus, video and more. Action cams provide sharp, fluid video, compact cameras are targeted to both tourists and vloggers, and DSLRs are available at some of the best prices we’ve seen. With so many different types of digital cameras, though, you may need some guidance to find just the right one – and that’s where we come in. Whether you’re a creator looking for just the right vlogging camera, an aspiring wildlife photographer or a sports enthusiast, we’ll help you find the perfect model to match your budget and needs.
Best mirrorless cameras under $2,000
Best mirrorless cameras over $2,000
There are a lot of reasons to choose a camera over a smartphone. The larger image sensors in mirrorless cameras let more light in, and you have a wide choice of lenses, from wide-angle to telephoto lenses, with far superior optics. Where smartphones have one f/stop, cameras have many, which gives you more exposure control. You also get natural and not AI-generated bokeh, quicker shooting, a physical shutter, more professional video results and so on.
With that extra quality comes a lot of extra factors to consider, however. The first thing is sensor size. In general, the larger the sensor size, the better (and usually more expensive) the camera.
Full frame is available on models like Sony's new ZV-E1, the Canon EOS R6 II and Panasonic S5 II. At a size equivalent to 35mm film (36 x 24mm), it offers the best performance in terms of image quality, low-light capability and depth of field. It's also the most expensive and finicky. While bokeh looks incredible at f/1.4, the depth of field is so razor thin that your subject's nose might be in focus but not their eyes. This can also make video shooting difficult.
The next size category is APS-C (around 23.5 x 15.6mm for most models and 22.2 x 14.8mm for Canon), offered on Fujifilm's X Series lineup, Canon’s R10 and R50 and the Nikon Z50. It's cheaper than full frame, both for the camera body and lenses, but still brings most of the advantages like decent bokeh, high ISOs for low-light shooting and relatively high resolution. With a sensor size the same as movie cameras, it's ideal for shooting video, and it’s easier to hold focus than with full-frame cameras.
Micro Four Thirds (17.3 x 13mm), a format shared by Panasonic and Olympus, is the next step down in sensor size. It offers less bokeh and light-gathering capability than APS-C and full frame, but allows for smaller and lighter cameras and lenses. For video, you can still get reasonably tight depth of field with good prime lenses, but focus is easier to control.
The other common sensor size is Type 1 (1 inch), which is actually smaller than one inch at 12.7 x 9.5mm. That's used mostly by compact models like Sony’s ZV-1 vlogging camera. Finally, action cameras like the GoPro Hero 11 and DJI’s Osmo 3 have even smaller sensors (1/1.9 and 1/1.7 size, respectively).
For photographers, another key factor is autofocus (AF) speed and accuracy. Most modern mirrorless cameras have hybrid phase-detect AF systems that allow for rapid focus and fast burst speeds. The majority also feature AI smarts like eye-detect AF for people and animals. However, some models are just a bit faster and more reactive than others.
The electronic viewfinder (EVF) and rear display are also key. The best models have the sharpest and brightest EVFs that let you best judge a shot before taking it. For things like street photography, it’s best to have as bright and sharp a rear display as possible. You may also want a screen that flips out rather than just tilting.
DSLRs and mirrorless cameras let you change lenses, but you're stuck with what's built into a compact camera. While that's great for portability, a single lens means you're going to sacrifice something. Fujifilm's X100V, for instance, has a fast but fixed 35mm-equivalent f/2.0 lens and no zoom. Sony's RX100 V has a 24-70mm zoom, but it's slower at the telephoto end (f/2.8) and less sharp than a prime lens.
When it comes to video, there are other factors to consider. Does your camera do “pixel-binning” for video recording or read out the entire sensor? Better cameras tend to do the latter. Another key factor is sensor speed, as slower sensors tend to have more rolling shutter that can create a “jello” effect that skews video.
In addition, how’s the battery life? How do you like the handling and feel? How long can you shoot video before the camera heats up or stops? Does it support 10-bit HDR video? Is there a microphone and/or a headphone jack? (if you do a lot of interviews, it's preferable to have both.) How's the video autofocus? All of these things play a part in your decision – so now let’s take a look at the best models.
Mirrorless is far and away the biggest category of cameras for these days, so it’s the best way to go if you want the best camera for photography with the most advanced features. Both Canon and Nikon recently announced they’re discontinuing development of new DSLRs, simply because most of the advantages of that category are gone, as I detailed in a recent video. The biggest selling feature of a mirrorless camera is the ability to change lenses depending on the type of shooting you want to do.
The key features are sensor size, resolution, autofocus, shooting speeds and video specs. If you’re primarily focused on sports photography or outdoor photography, you’ll likely want fast shooting speeds and accurate autofocus. Portrait and landscape shooters will likely favor large sensors and high resolution to maximize image quality. And content creators will want to look for things like flip-out displays, high-end video specifications and good in-body stabilization. Price point is, of course, a major factor as well.
My top budget camera pick is Canon’s brand new 24.2-megapixel R50, which is one of the best cameras for photography, and content creators will love it. It can shoot bursts at up to 15 fps in electronic shutter mode, and offers 4K 10-bit at up to 30p with supersampling and no crop. It has a fully articulating display, and unlike other cameras in this price range, an electronic viewfinder. It uses Canon’s Dual Pixel AF with subject recognition mode, and even has a popup flash. The only drawback is the lack of decent quality lens that’s as affordable as the camera itself, and a lack of in-body stabilization.
Autofocus: Dual Pixel CMOS AF II with 651 points
Max shutter speed: 15 fps
WiFi: Yes
Bluetooth: Yes
Full-frame cameras generally used to start at $2,000 and up, but Canon’s brand new EOS R8 is priced at just $1,500. It offers Canon’s excellent Dual Pixel AF with subject recognition AI, and can shoot bursts at up to 40 fps. It's equally strong with video, supporting oversampled 10-bit 4K at up to 60 fps. The R8 also offers a flip-out display, making it great for vloggers. The main drawback is a lack of in-body stabilization.
Content creators should take a hard look at Panasonic’s full-frame S5 II. It’s the company’s first camera with hybrid phase-detect AF designed to make focus "wobble" and other issues a thing of the past. You can shoot sharp 4K 30p video downsampled from the full sensor width, or 4K 60p from an APS-C cropped size, all in 10-bit color. It even offers 5.9K 30p capture, along with RAW 5.9K external output to an Atomos recorder. You also get a flip-out screen for vlogging and updated five-axis in-body stabilization that’s the best in the industry. Photo quality is also good thanks to the dual-gain 24-megapixel sensor. The main drawback is the slowish burst speeds.
Read our full review of the Panasonic Lumix S5 II
Equipped with the same backside-illuminated (BSI) 12-megapixel sensor as the A7S III, Sony’s ZV-E1 offers excellent low-light performance, 4K at up to 120p and a host of new AI features like auto framing, making it one of the best cameras for photography and videography. It also comes with an updated in-body image stabilization system aimed at vloggers that can smooth out even jolting movements like footsteps. The $2,200 price tag makes it enticing for vloggers as it offers features found on the $3,500 A7S III for considerably less money.
Autofocus: 759 points
Max shutter speed: 10 fps
WiFi: No
Bluetooth: Yes
If you’re OK with a smaller APS-C sensor, check out the Fujifilm X-H2S. It has an incredibly fast stacked, backside-illuminated 26.1-megapixel sensor that allows for rapid burst shooting speeds of 40 fps, along with 4K 120p video with minimal rolling shutter. It can capture ProRes 10-bit video internally, has 7 stops of in-body stabilization and a class-leading EVF. Yes, it’s expensive for an APS-C camera, but on the other hand, it’s the cheapest stacked sensor camera overall. The other downside is AF that’s not quite up to Canon and Sony’s level.
Read our full review of the Fujifilm X-H2S
For the ultimate high-resolution camera, check out Sony’s A7R V. With a 61-megapixel sensor, it shoots sharp and beautiful images at a very respectable speed for such a high-resolution model (10 fps). It has an equally fast and reliable autofocus system, the sharpest viewfinder on the market and in-body stabilization that’s much improved over the A7R IV. Video has even improved, with 8K and 10-bit options now on tap, albeit with significant rolling shutter. If you don’t need the video features, however, Sony’s A7R IVa does mostly the same job, photo-wise, and costs a few hundred dollars less.
Read our full review of the Sony A7R V
The most important features to look for in an action cam are image quality, stabilization and battery life. GoPro has easily been beating all rivals over the last few years in all those areas, but DJI made some strides last year with the Osmo Action 3. At the same time, GoPro’s latest models are more expensive than rivals.
GoPro didn’t change the design on its latest model, but it has a larger sensor that enables a couple of cool features – Horizon Lock stabilization and Full Frame mode that makes it easier to shoot for, say, TikTok and YouTube at the same time. It also offers a new wider, though slightly distorted Hyperview field of view.
Otherwise, the Hero 11 Black offers better video quality than ever (up to 5.3K 60p), Hypersmooth stabilization that’s still the best in the business (by far), battery life that’s improved by 40 percent over the last model, and more. It’s easily the best action camera on the market, but you pay for that: it’s $400 with a one year subscription ($500 without it), compared to $329 for the DJI Osmo Action 3 and $300 for the Insta360 RS 4K bundle. If you’re serious about filming extreme sports, though, it’s worth it.
WiFi: Yes
Bluetooth: Yes
Read our full review of the GoPro Hero 11
After experimenting with an oddball modular design on the Action 2, design has gone back to a more classic action cam design on the Osmo Action 3. It also comes with a slick new magnetic quick-release mount that lets you connect the camera directly to a GoPro-style mount with or without the case. Video quality and stabilization are quite good, but fall short of the Hero 11 Black (the Action 3 tops out at 4K 120p resolution compared to 5.3K 60p on the GoPro). While it’s not quite as good as the Hero 11, it’s considerably cheaper.
Read our full review of the DJI Osmo Action 3
This category has fewer cameras than it did even a few years ago and many models are older, as manufacturers focus instead on mirrorless models. However, I’m still a big believer in compact cameras. This type of camera is a big step up from smartphones quality-wise, and a lot of people will take a compact traveling or to events when they’d never bother with the hassle of a DSLR or mirrorless camera.
Compacts largely have type 1-inch sensors, but a few offer larger options, particularly Fujifilm’s XF-100V. Another popular model, Sony’s XV-1, is primarily aimed at content creators looking to step up. In any case, desirable qualities include image quality, a fast lens, relatively long zoom, flip-out display, good battery life, a high quality EVF, decent video and good pocketability.
The X100V is the latest in Fujifilm's famous fixed-lens X100 camera series. Like other models in the lineup, it has an APS-C sensor and a 23mm f/2.0 lens, equivalent to 35mm on a full-frame sensor. You also get the same hybrid optical/electronic viewfinder, mechanical dials, film simulations and good looks as before. But the X100V is the most significant advancement in the series' history. It has Fujifilm's latest 26.1-megapixel X-Trans 4 CMOS sensor compared to 24.2-megapixels on the last model and a new, sharper lens to handle that extra resolution.
A new tilting rear display makes "shooting from the hip" street photography much easier, as does the fast 11 fps/20 fps shooting speeds in mechanical/silent shutter modes. You also get a better hybrid phase- and contrast-detect autofocus (AF) system with more AF points along with face and eye detection. Finally, it now has the same 4K video-shooting features as the X-T30. It doesn't come cheap, but the X100V is the ultimate camera if you're into street photography – assuming you can find one.
Max shutter speed: 20 fps
WiFi: Yes
Bluetooth: Yes
Read our full review of the Fujifilm X100V
The ZV-1 is Sony’s first RX100-series camera designed specifically for vlogging. It does that job well thanks to a lightweight body, built-in high-quality microphone, flip-out display, best-in-class autofocus and excellent image quality. The 24-70mm lens is sharp, but it needs to be wider because of the 25 percent crop when using electronic stabilization. It also lacks a true touch display and a headphone port. That nitpicking aside, if you’re looking to step up from a smartphone or just want something simple, it does the job nearly perfectly.
Read our full review of the Sony ZV-1
For a value compact camera, the best option is Panasonic’s 20-megapixel ZS-200. It offers a lot of features for the price, like a 1-inch, 20.1 megapixel sensor, 5-axis stabilization, 4K, 30 fps video and more. Its main claim to fame, though, is the 24-360x lens that offers incredible reach for travel and more. Though it dates back to 2018, it’s actually one of the more recent compact models.
With mirrorless cameras taking over the interchangeable lens market, DSLRs still give you the ability to change lenses at relatively cheap prices. The defining feature is the reflex mirror that lets you look directly through the lens at your subject with no electronics in between. Most also have very fast autofocus thanks to a dedicated phase-detect sensor, and very fast battery life. However, many lack features you’d expect on modern mirrorless cameras like subject tracking, eye-detection and more.
Nikon's full-frame (FX) D850 is the best deal on a high-end camera and arguably the best camera for photography. With a 45.7-megapixel sensor and max 102,400 ISO, it gives you the best quality for the money, whether mirrorless or DSLR. It can also shoot fast, at up to 7fps, which is very good for such a high-res camera. In addition, the battery life (1840 shots on a charge) puts any mirrorless option to shame, and there’s a massive number of FX Nikkor lens options to choose from. Nikon has upped its video game as well with the D850 by introducing 4K internal recording. If you’d still rather have a live optical rather than an electronic view, the D850 is the best option available.
Autofocus: 153 points
Max shutter speed: 7 fps
WiFi: Yes
Bluetooth: Yes
Another one of the best cameras for photography is Canon’s 24-megapixel APS-C EOS Rebel SL3, which has a great blend of features, build quality and value. It offers features like a vari-angle touchscreen, 4K video (albeit with a crop) and Dual Pixel autofocus technology in live mode. You get shooting speeds of up to 5 fps, 1600 shots on a charge and an ISO range up to 51,200 (expanded). It also offers guided screen options for beginners. Best of all, it offers excellent picture quality for the price thanks to Canon’s skin-friendly color science.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/best-cameras-151524327.html?src=rss
Panasonic S5 II full-frame mirrorless camera review
Panasonic S5 II full-frame mirrorless camera review
Enlarge (credit: Roberto Machado Noa / Contributor | LightRocket)
Last month, the FBI created a national online database to finally start coordinating law enforcement reports about "swatting" attacks nationwide, NBC News reported yesterday.
Swatting is a form of domestic terrorism that is sometimes deadly and has become more widespread in the US, according to a March report from Hal Berghel, a computer science professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Berghel's report defined swatting as:
A malicious act that involves making fraudulent 911 calls to cause emergency response teams, such as law enforcement special weapons and tactics teams, or SWAT teams (that’s where the gerund’s root comes from), to react forcefully to a nonexistent public threat.
Scott Schubert, of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services, told NBC News that the database will help combat the growing swatting problem by facilitating "information sharing between hundreds of police departments and law enforcement agencies across the country pertaining to swatting incidents."
Creative and fun, Mizetto’s Summer 2023 Collection lives somewhere between work and play. The brand has pushed its own capabilities, exploring new materials, production methods, and functionality. Made in Sweden, the latest release includes a wood chair, a versatile table with attachments, a leaning piece, modular planters, and a trash/recycling bin. All share the qualities of clean lines and curves and leave you wanting to experience each for yourself. Known for its color combinations, Mizetto has also added five new “Nordic noir” hues: rusty burgundy, cloudy latte, forest green, latte, and dusty blue.
Lumber by Addi \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Perhaps the most curious addition is Lumber by Addi, a piece meant for leaning, lingering, and loitering. The soft beam’s release marks the first upholstered product introduced by the brand. It’s a great answer to adding seating to small spaces, and we can’t help but note its resemblance to a dynamic piece of gymnastics equipment. A quick place to stop on the go for a coffee or email check, Lumber’s small tray-like table adds further functionality to a piece with no obvious front or back. It can even be hung on a wall for maximum space saving. Lumber’s upholstery is flameproof wool, with a cover that’s fully removable, repairable, and exchangeable. The legs are powder coated metal.
Lumber by Addi \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Lumber by Addi \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Lumber by Addi \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Embrace Chair by Sami Kallio \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
A wooden chair is new territory for Mizetto, so they turned to an expert for help – Finish-Swedish furniture designer and woodworker Sami Kallio. The Embrace armchair was a result of the brand lacking seating in their own spaces, and shortly after, Kallio walked in with a fully functioning prototype.
“A few alterations later, Embrace was born; a chair that seemingly hugs its user. I love how it can be hung on a tabletop and stacked, but still provide us with all the beauty and comfort we seek in a piece of furniture,” said Rickard Muskala, founder, and chief of product development.
Kallio is also behind the multi-purpose table in the Embrace series.
Embrace Chair + Embrace Table by Sami Kallio \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Embrace Chair + Embrace Table by Sami Kallio \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Embrace Chair by Sami Kallio \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Plant Here by addi \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Playful, fun, and modular, Addi’s Plant Here gives our green friends a pedestal fitting of their mood-enhancing ways. The planter pays attention to the various needs of different varietals through its accessible design, whether you’re a balcony or office gardener. Features include a generous depth, transparent inner pot for easy planting, different heights, shapes, sizes, and colors. Combine two or more to form endlessly possible installations.
Plant Here by addi \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Pelican by Studio Nooi
Trash and recycling bins are a necessity, but that doesn’t mean they have to look like one. Pelican by Studio Nooi turns them into minimal decorative objects with touchless interaction. Their semicircular shape allows for modular design, creating an oval when placed back to back. Pelican’s design is suitable for residential as well as commercial spaces, and comes in two sizes and a variety of colors.
Pelican by Studio Nooi
Pelican by Studio Nooi \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Pelican by Studio Nooi \\\ Photo: Jonas Lindstrom
Pelican by Studio Nooi
To learn more about Mizetto’s Summer 2023 collection, visit mizetto.se.
This extraordinary profile of Clarence and Ginni Thomas—he a Supreme Court justice, she among other things an avid supporter of the January 6 insurrection—is a masterclass in everything from mustering archival material to writing the hell out of a story:
There is a certain rapport that cannot be manufactured. “They go on morning runs,” reports a 1991 piece in the Washington Post. “They take after-dinner walks. Neighbors say you can see them in the evening talking, walking up the hill. Hand in hand.” Thirty years later, Virginia Thomas, pining for the overthrow of the federal government in texts to the president’s chief of staff, refers, heartwarmingly, to Clarence Thomas as “my best friend.” (“That’s what I call him, and he is my best friend,” she later told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.) In the cramped corridors of a roving RV, they summer together. They take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift. Bonnie and Clyde were performing intimacy; every line crossed was its own profession of love. Refusing to recuse oneself and then objecting, alone among nine justices, to the revelation of potentially incriminating documents regarding a coup in which a spouse is implicated is many things, and one of those things is romantic.
“Every year it gets better,” Ginni told a gathering of Turning Point USA–oriented youths in 2016. “He put me on a pedestal in a way I didn’t know was possible.” Clarence had recently gifted her a Pandora charm bracelet. “It has like everything I love,” she said, “all these love things and knots and ropes and things about our faith and things about our home and things about the country. But my favorite is there’s a little pixie, like I’m kind of a pixie to him, kind of a troublemaker.”
A pixie. A troublemaker. It is impossible, once you fully imagine this bracelet bestowed upon the former Virginia Lamp on the 28th anniversary of her marriage to Clarence Thomas, this pixie-and-presumably-American-flag-bedecked trinket, to see it as anything but crucial to understanding the current chaotic state of the American project. Here is a piece of jewelry in which symbols for love and battle are literally intertwined. Here is a story about the way legitimate racial grievance and determined white ignorance can reinforce one another, tending toward an extremism capable, in this case, of discrediting an entire branch of government. No one can unlock the mysteries of the human heart, but the external record is clear: Clarence and Ginni Thomas have, for decades, sustained the happiest marriage in the American Republic, gleeful in the face of condemnation, thrilling to the revelry of wanton corruption, untroubled by the burdens of biological children or adherence to legal statute. Here is how they do it.
Every spring, the not-quite-pristine waters of Boston Harbor fill with schools of silvery, hand-sized fish known as alewives and blueback herring.
Some of them gather at the mouth of a slow-moving river that winds through one of the most densely populated and heavily industrialized watersheds in America. After spending three or four years in the Atlantic Ocean, the herring have returned to spawn in the freshwater ponds where they were born, at the headwaters of the Mystic River.
In my imagination, the herring hesitate before committing to this last leg of their journey. Do they remember what awaits them?
To reach their spawning grounds seven miles from the harbor, the herring will have to swim past shoals of rusted shopping carts and ancient tires embedded in the toxic muck left by four centuries of human enterprise. Tanneries, shipyards, slaughterhouses, chemical and glue factories, wastewater utilities, scrap yards, power plants — all have used the Mystic as a drainpipe, either deliberately or through neglect.
But today, the water is clean enough to sustain fish and many other kinds of fauna. As they push upstream, the herring may hear the muffled sounds of laughter, bicycle bells, car horns and music coming from riverside parks. They will slip under hundreds of kayaks, dinghies, motorboats, rowing sculls and paddleboards and dart through the shadows cast by a total of thirteen bridges. At three different points they will muscle their way up fish ladders to get past the dams that punctuate the upper reaches of the river. They will generally ignore baited hooks and garish lures cast by anglers. And they will try to evade the herring gulls, cormorants, herons, striped bass, snapping turtles, and even the occasional bald eagle that love to eat them.
Last year, an estimated 420,000 herring made it through this gauntlet and into the safety of three urban ponds where they could lay their eggs.
And almost no one noticed.
That an urban river should teem with wildlife while serving as a magnet for human recreation no longer seems remarkable to the people of this part of Boston. Few are familiar with the chain of human actions and reactions that produced this happy outcome. Fewer still know that for most of the past 150 years, the Mystic River was seen as an eyesore, a civic disgrace, and a monument to inertia, indifference, and greed.
In this sense, the Mystic is an extreme example of a paradoxical pattern repeated in urban waterways around the world.
First, humans discover the advantages of living next to rivers, which provide a convenient source of drinking water, food, transportation and waste disposal. For a few decades — or even centuries — these uses coexist, even as people downstream begin to complain about the smell. A Bronze Age settlement eventually becomes a trading post, which grows into a medieval town and, centuries later, an industrializing city, smell and waste building up along the way. Until one hot day in the summer of 01858 a statesman in London describes the River Thames as “a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors.”
Civil engineers are summoned, and they deliver the bad news. The only way to resurrect the river and get rid of the smell is to install a massive system for underground sewage collection and pass strict laws prohibiting industrial discharges. The necessary infrastructure is staggeringly expensive and will take years to build, at great inconvenience to city residents. Even after the system is completed, the river will need at least half a century to gradually purge itself to the point where swimming or fishing might once again be safe.
The implication of this temporal caveat — that politicians who announce the project will be long dead when it delivers its full intended benefits — would normally be a non-starter for a municipal budget committee. But the revulsion provoked by raw sewage, and its power as a symbol of backwardness, make it impossible to postpone the matter indefinitely. In London, the tipping point came during the “Great Stink” of 01858, when the combination of a heat wave and low water levels made things so unbearable that Parliament was forced to fund a revolutionary drainage system that is still in use today.
In city after city, similar crises set in motion a process that can be neatly plotted on a graph. Increasing investments in sanitation infrastructure and stricter enforcement of environmental laws gradually lead to better water quality. Fish and waterfowl eventually return, to the amazement of local residents. Riverfront real estate soars in value, prompting the construction of new housing, parks, restaurants and music venues. Generations that had lived “with their backs to the river” rediscover the pleasures of relaxing on its banks. In many European cities, once-squalid waterways are now so immaculate that downtown office workers take lunch-time dips in the summer, no showers required. In Bern, Switzerland, and Munich, Germany, some people “swim to work.”
Then, in the final stage of this process, everyone succumbs to collective amnesia.
In Ian McEwan’s 02005 novel Saturday, the protagonist briefly reflects on the infrastructure that makes life in his London townhouse so pleasant: “…an eighteenth-century dream bathed and embraced by modernity, by streetlight from above, and from below fiber-optic cables, and cool fresh water coursing down pipes, and sewage borne away in an instant of forgetting.”
While the engineering, biology and economics of river restorations are relatively straightforward, the stories we tell ourselves about them are not. “An instant of forgetting” could well be the motto of all well-functioning sanitation systems, which conveniently detach us from the reality of the waste we produce. But the chain of events that brings us to this instant often begins with the act of remembering an uncontaminated past.
Call it ecological nostalgia. A search of the words “pollution” and “Mystic River” in the digital archives of the Boston Globe turns up nearly 700 items spread over the past 155 years, and offers a useful proxy for tracking the perceptions of the river over time. We think of pollution as a modern phenomenon, but in the late 19th century the Globe was full of letters, reports and opinions recalling the river in an earlier, uncorrupted state. In 01865, a writer complains that formerly delicious oysters from the Mystic have been “rendered unpalatable” by pollution. In 01876 a correspondent claims that as a boy he enjoyed swimming in the Mystic — before it was turned into an open sewer. Four years later a writer laments that the river herring fishery “was formerly so great that the towns received quite a large revenue from it.” And by 01905, a columnist calls for the “improvement and purification” of the Mystic, urging the Board of Health and the Metropolitan Park Commission to work together on “the restoration of the river to its former attractive and sanitary condition.”
These sepia-colored evocations of a prelapsarian past are a recurring feature of river restoration narratives to this day. “Sadly, only septuagenarians can now recall summer days a half century earlier when the laughter of children swimming in the Mystic River echoed in this vicinity,” writes a Globe columnist in 01993. Last year, in a piece on the spectacular recovery of Boston’s better-known Charles River, Derrick Z. Jackson quoted an activist who believes such images were critical to building public support for the project: “people remembered that their grandmothers swam in the Charles and wanted that for themselves again.” Whether or not anyone was actually swimming in these rivers in the mid-20th century is irrelevant — the idea is evocative and, as a call to action, effective.
But the notion that a watercourse can be healed and returned to an Edenic state is also disingenuous. As Heraclitus elegantly put in the fourth century BC, “No man ever steps into a river twice; for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.” Biologists are quick to point out that the Mystic watershed will never revert to its 17th century state. As chronicled in Richard H. Beinecke’s The Mystic River: A Natural and Human History and Recreation Guide (02013), when English colonists arrived they encountered a thinly populated tidal marshland where the native Massachussett, Nipmuc and Pawtucket tribes had lived sustainably for at least two thousand years. Since then, the Mystic and its tributaries have been dammed, channelized, straightened and dredged into an unstable ecosystem that will require active maintenance in perpetuity.
As the physical river has changed, so have the subjective justifications for restoring it. The Boston Globe archives show that for a 50-year period starting in the 01860s, people were primarily motivated by the loss of oysters and fish stocks described above, and by fears that exposure to sewage might lead to outbreaks of cholera and typhoid. But by the time of the Great Depression, the first municipal sewage systems had largely succeeded in channeling wastewater away from residential areas, and concerns about the river had found new targets.
Writers to the Globe began to complain that fuel leaks from barges on the Mystic were spoiling “the only bathing beach” in the city of Somerville, one of the main towns along the river. In 01930, the Globe reported that local and state representatives “stormed the office of the Metropolitan Planning Division yesterday to request action on the 29-year-old project of improving and developing certain tracts along the Mystic riverbank for playground and bathing purposes.” A decade later, not much had changed. “For years,” claimed an editorial in 01940, “the Mystic River has been unfit for bathing because of pollution and hundreds of children in Somerville, Medford and Arlington have been deprived of their most natural and accessible swimming place.”
In the 01960s and 70s, this emphasis on recreational uses of the river broadened into the ecological priorities of the nascent environmental movement. Apocalyptic images of fire burning on the surface of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River galvanized public alarm over the state of urban waterways. President Lyndon Johnson authorized billions of dollars in federal funds to “end pollution” and subsidize the construction of new sewage treatment plants. And the Clean Water Act of 01972 imposed ambitious benchmarks and aggressive timelines for curtailing source pollution.
Suddenly, the tiny community of Bostonians who cared about the Mystic felt like they were part of a global movement. Articles from this period feature junior high schoolers taking water samples in the Mystic and collecting signatures for anti-pollution petitions they would send to state representatives. The petitions worked. News of companies being fined for unlawful discharges became routine, and the Globe began inviting readers to report scofflaws for its “Polluter of the Week” column. An article in 01970 described a group of students at Tufts University who spent a semester conducting an in-depth study of the river and recommended forming a Mystic River Watershed Association (MyRWA) to coordinate clean-up efforts.
The creation of the MyRWA, which has just celebrated its 50th anniversary, mirrors the rise of activist organizations that would become powerful agents of accountability and continuity in settings where municipal officials often serve just two-year terms. In a letter to the editor from 01985, MyRWA’s first president, Herbert Meyer, chastised the regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency for ignoring scientific evidence regarding efforts to clean Boston Harbor. “Volunteer groups like ours have limited budgets and no staff,” he wrote. “Our strengths are our longevity – we remember earlier studies – and objectivity. We speak our minds: Not being hired, we cannot be fired, if we take an unpopular stand.”
MyRWA volunteers began collecting regular water samples and sending them to municipal authorities to keep up pressure for change. They also found creative ways to get local residents to overcome their preconceptions and reconnect with the river: paddling excursions, a series of riverside murals painted by local high school students, periodic meet-ups to remove invasive plants and a herring counting project that tracks the fish on their yearly spawning run.
For the last two decades, coverage in the Boston Globe has celebrated the efforts of these and other volunteers (as in a 02002 profile of Roger Frymire, who paddles up and down the Mystic sniffing for suspicious outfalls: “He has a really sensitive nose, particularly for sewage”). But it has also continued to display the negativity bias that is perhaps inevitable in a daily newspaper. In a 02015 editorial, the paper urges city officials to “Set 2024 goal for a swimmable Mystic” as part of an (ultimately abandoned) bid to host the Olympic Games. “If Olympic organizers moved the swim… to the Mystic River, the 2024 deadline could spur the long-overdue clean-up of Boston’s forgotten river,” the editorial claimed, as if the Boston Globe had not chronicled each stage of that clean-up for more than a century.
For Patrick Herron, MyRWA’s current president, this “generational ignorance” is to be expected. “If we could all see what our great-great-grandparents saw, and then we zoomed to the present, we would be appalled,” he said in a recent interview. “But we can only remember what we saw 20 or 30 years ago, and things today aren’t that much different.”
Baselines shift: each generation takes progress for granted and zeroes in on a new irritant. Herron said that MyRWA’s current crop of volunteers, like their predecessors, brings a new vocabulary and fresh motivations to the table. The initial focus on water quality has morphed into a struggle for “environmental justice,” which explicitly elevates the needs of ethnic minorities, lower-income residents, and other marginalized groups that have been disproportionately affected by the Mystic’s problems. Climate change, and the increasingly frequent flooding that still causes raw sewage to spill into the river, is now at the center of debates about the next generation of infrastructure investments needed to protect the Mystic.
Lisa Brukilacchio, one of the early members of MyRWA, thinks these shifts are inevitable. “Change is cyclical,” she said. In her experience, young volunteers show little interest in what their predecessors achieved. “You fix one thing and it’s, like, over here there’s another problem. People have short attention spans, and they want to see something happen now.”
John Reinhardt, a Bostonian who was involved in MyRWA’s leadership for over 30 years, agrees with Brukilacchio and adds that this indifference to the past may be essential to preventing complacency. “I think that there is incredible value to the amnesia,” he said. “Because of the amnesia, people come in and say, damn it, this isn’t right. I have to do something about it, because nobody else is!”
To generate a sense of urgency and compel action, it may perhaps be necessary to minimize both the scale of previous crises and the contributions of our forebears. Bradford Johnson, an artist based in Somerville, sees the Mystic as a canvas onto which each generation overlays its own fears and aspirations. In a series of paintings (three of which accompany this essay) Johnson juxtaposes archival images of the Mystic, fragments of magazine advertising, photos of local wildlife, and single-celled organisms viewed under a microscope. In each panel, layers of paint are interspersed with multiple coats of clear acrylic, creating a thick, semi-translucent surface that cracks as it dries.
Johnson’s paintings dwell on the arbitrary ways in which we select and manipulate memories of a landscape. They also incorporate details from elaborate charts created by Clarence Larkin (01850–01924), an American Baptist pastor and author whose writings were popular among conservative Protestants. The charts were studied by believers who wanted to understand Biblical prophecy and map God's action in history. I interpret Johnson’s inclusion of these panels as a nod to the role of human will in the destruction and subsequent reclamation of a landscape, and to religious and secular notions of redemption.
It so happens that the timescales required to resurrect an urban river are similar to those needed to construct a gothic cathedral. Both enterprises depend on thousands of anonymous individuals to perform mundane, often-unglamorous tasks over several generations.
But the similarities end there. Cathedrals emerge from a single blueprint in predictable and well-ordered stages. When completed, they preserve the work of each mason, carpenter and stained-glass artisan as a static monument to a shared creed. They are made of stone to underscore the illusion of permanence.
Rivers, with their ceaseless, shape-shifting flux, remind us that none of our labor will last. The process of reclaiming a dead river is the opposite of orderly: it lurches through seasons of outrage and indifference, earnest clean-ups followed by another fuel spill, budget battles and political grand-standing, nostalgia and frustration. It is messy, elusive, and never actually finished.
Yet in Boston and many other cities, this process is working. And as testaments to a different kind of human agency, resurrected rivers are, in their own way, no less majestic than the structures at Canterbury or Notre-Dame.
“Cathedral thinking” has long been a slogan among evangelists for multi-generational collaboration. “River restoration thinking” may be a more apposite model for tackling the problems of our fractious age.
The ORCID US consortium, managed by Lyrasis, is five years old in 2023 - hear about their progress so far and plans for the future in Alice Meadows' interview with their PID Program Leader, Sheila Raybun
The post The ORCID US Consortium at Five: What’s Worked, What Hasn’t, and Why? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is celebrating its 10-year anniversary, a great opportunity to reflect on how far we have come with open infrastructures for the distribution and discoverability of open access books (monographs, edited collections, and other long-form publications).
The post Guest Post — Towards Global Equity for Open Access Books appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
"Researchers have only so many hours in a day; if they can spend one less hour on a research article because we have implemented improved workflows and better technology, that’s one more hour they can spend on research to try to save my life, and the lives of all ALS patients." In today's post, Bruce Rosenblum shares his experience as a clinical trial participant and how that contributed to scholarly publications.
The post Guest Post — Being Research Data appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Is there value to be found in national, or language based preprint servers? Matthew Salter discusses lessons learned from the first year of Japan's Jxiv.
The post Guest Post — A Year of Jxiv – Warming the Preprints Stone appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
During the summer slow-down, many news items will be consolidated in occasional “philosophy news” summary posts. This is the first.
Discussion welcome.
The post Philosophy News Summary first appeared on Daily Nous.
Guest post by María José Méndez
This post is part of a series on illicit economies, organized crime, and extra-legal actors and came out of an IGCC-sponsored conference hosted in October 2022 by the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy.
In 2019, a 19-year-old woman detonated a grenade on a public bus in an extortion attempt in Guatemala City. Three years later, another woman was arrested for trying to smuggle ammunition and cell phones into a maximum-security prison in Honduras.
Accounts of criminal violence tend to portray women as passive victims. There are good reasons for this. Women are abused daily by criminal groups, especially in Latin America, where they are being killed at record rates. In Central America, women are victimized by gangs when they refuse sexual advances or protect their children from recruitment. In Mexico, they are forced into sex work by drug cartels, and their mutilated bodies are displayed to send messages to rival groups and the state.
Considering this rampant victimization, how important is the role that women play in criminal violence and what drives their participation? My research delves into this question by studying women affiliated with MS-13 and Barrio 18 in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
While women have long played an active role in armed conflict, comprising as much as 30 percent of militant movements worldwide, the discussion around women’s involvement in violence tends to ignore contexts of organized crime and why women choose to stay in violent organizations.
In Central America, women are increasingly taking on lethal activities within gangs. This trend is also evident in other countries where women’s engagement in violent crime is also growing and diversifying. In Mexico and Colombia, where the number of female prisoners has more than doubled in the past decade, women have assumed prominent positions in drug trafficking organizations, with some even serving as leaders of their own criminal enterprises.
Several of the women I spoke with participated in hired killings and attacks against local business owners unable or unwilling to pay extortions. One former gang member said she felt “stronger than men” when given these missions; another spoke about regaining a sense of control, which had been shattered by a traumatic experience of rape. For both, participation in violence was a way of asserting power and earning respect from fellow gang members. For others, it was simply a way of surviving. As one put it to me, “In Honduras [t]here are no jobs for us […] But you must work to survive. We survive from contract killings, extortions, drug sales and kidnappings.”
Women’s contributions to violence also manifest in indirect ways, as revealed in a series of 2018 confiscated letters. In these letters, an imprisoned Honduran gang leader asks his wife to serve as a communication bridge with those outside, and to fulfill his daily needs. Requests for logistical support intermingled with demands for basic items, such as boxers and bars of soap, and reminders to give him and his children physical and emotional warmth.
As with armed conflict, criminal violence is made possible by a gender-based division of labor, where women bear the brunt of logistical and caregiving tasks. Most of these activities revolve around Central American prisons, which have become important nodes of decision-making for extortion schemes.
In a context of “mano dura” policies of mass incarceration and state persecution, which have imposed heavy constraints on gang members’ movements since the early 2000s, women have become pivotal in maintaining the complex operations that coordinate between gang members. The women I spoke with acted as the “eyes and hands” of imprisoned gang members, providing support in the transportation of weapons, transmission of messages, record-keeping, and intelligence gathering.
Some of these activities provided unexpected windows for enhancing their entrepreneurial and leadership skills. For instance, one woman who worked for her husband, a Salvadoran gang leader, spoke about how she leveraged this activity to offer paid courier services for other gang members on her own initiative. This allowed her to better support her children and ailing mother.
Gang-affiliated women also supply the basic services and goods—food, clothing, emotional support, childcare, and so on—necessary to sustain gang members and therefore their capacity to engage in the work of violence. One former gang member, for example, related how she was able to commit fully to the gang’s illicit activities because her aunt cared for her one-year-old son.
Women’s role in criminal violence is more important than we often realize. To acknowledge this role, we need to challenge traditional gender stereotypes that reduce criminal violence to a male phenomenon. We also need to challenge a prevalent assumption in research on women and organized violence: that women’s participation in lethal activities is simply the result of male manipulation or submission to patriarchal authority. This means paying attention to how women are also driven by their own aspirations for status and well-being.
Recognizing women’s complex agency in criminal violence, including the different labors they perform and the gendered factors shaping their involvement, is essential for helping address the unprecedented levels of criminal lethality affecting regions like Latin America. As scholars have argued, a clear understanding of the full range of women’s participation in violence can yield effective policy that gives women access to peace initiatives.
María José Méndez is an assistant professor in the Political Science department at the University of Toronto.
Biosphere 2 was built in the late 01980s by the most unlikely group: a cast of creatives, a charismatic philosopher-king, a financier, theater nerds, and an amazing crew of engineers. The idea behind Biosphere 2 (Biosphere 1, of course, being the Earth) was to build a self-contained structure and set of systems that could test the idea of a self-contained space colony, albeit one that was anchored to the earth. In 01991, just four years after construction began, B2 was launched: a team of Eight “econauts” were sealed into the three-acre habitat, along with a Noah’s ark-load of life. Ostensibly, the challenge was simply to see if they could survive.
A team from Long Now arrived in Oracle, Arizona to tour Biosphere 2 on the evening of October 26, 02022, just as the sun was setting. We were there to investigate: to see if there were lessons that we could extract from B2 and apply at Long Now, specifically to the Clock of the Long Now. We all had done our homework and watched Spaceship Earth, the excellent new documentary that retells the B2 origin story. But nothing can really prepare one for the experience of encountering B2 in person.
Oracle, Arizona, is a long way from anywhere. The Sonoran Desert is a reasonable analog for the surface of Mars. And the ziggurats of steel and glass rise above the high plain like an American Giza.
The point of the original Biosphere 2 was bold, but straightforward enough. It was an experiment to see if it would be possible to create a self-contained ecosystem – one large enough to support the lives of the team inside. It was a space station, right here on Earth. And yet, right away, we had so many questions:
Like, why was there what seemed to be a vent at the top of the pyramid? Why install a vent on a closed system?
And what was that UFO-like object peeking out from behind the main pyramid?
These and other questions would have to wait until morning.
The next day, the team gathered for a tour given by John Adams, the Deputy Director and Chief Operations Officer of the facility. He explained that the tower structure that had so puzzled us the day before was, in fact, an observation tower. It was assumed that the original inhabitants of B2 would need a place to retreat to where they could observe “Biosphere 1” – the earth that they had left behind. The vent was installed to cool the glass pyramid, which, in reality, became a giant solar oven in the middle of the desert whenever the sun shined through it— which, in Arizona, was essentially every day. The vent was a striking reminder that B2 is rarely operated as a completely closed system. The ambition to study earth in a hermetically-sealed system has largely been supplanted by a more practical use for the facility: an ecological laboratory that can control more variables than nature allows. Under the auspices of its new owner, The University of Arizona, B2 is now mostly operated as a very large greenhouse, but it has the capability to do far more.
Biosphere 2’s 676,000-gallon “ocean” is the site of some rather significant science. It was here, in the living coral reef that lives under the faux ocean, that scientists proved that there was a direct connection between the increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and decreasing coral calcification rates. There is currently an effort to breed and genetically engineer corals that can survive climate change – and those corals will be tested at B2 before being released into the open oceans.
The rainforest is also the site of important climate change research. Climate modelers have subjected it to drought, to floods, to higher-than-normal temperatures, and to atmospheres with higher-than-normal CO2 concentrations. The point is not to see what happens to the B2 rainforest per se, but rather to validate and calibrate the predictions that the climate models are pumping out about the fate of real rainforests during the coming Anthropocene.
B2’s former agricultural areas, the greenhouses where the original econauts grew their food, are now home to L.E.O.: the Landscape Evolution Observatory. L.E.O. has been called the first step in a new science of terraforming planets – which sounds exciting, but in practice boils down to watering sand and then watching that sand slowly turn into soil. Earth scientists have used B2 to watch dirt “grow” for eight years now. Next year they’re going to sprinkle some hay seeds over the newly-formed soil and see what happens.
The tour really got interesting when we were led into the life support system under Biosphere 2 – the so-called technosphere.
At the end of the tunnel is a giant variable volume chamber. It’s a “lung” that, when the biosphere is sealed up tight, fills and contracts with air. Remarkably, the sealed biosphere still loses less air by percentage volume than the International Space Station. When the sun rises, so does the lung’s 40-thousand-pound metal roof, which is attached to the walls by a flexible rubber membrane. And then when the sun sets, the roof settles back in place. Without the lung, B2 wouldn’t have lasted a single day – the windows would have shattered due to the changing atmospheric pressure inside.
As we wandered the grounds, it became apparent what an impressive feat of engineering Biosphere 2 was — and still is.
That evening, we gathered to consider what we saw at Biosphere 2. When B2 was first in the news back in 01991, it was hailed as a visionary piece of engineering which, by its very existence, asked us to understand ourselves differently. Biosphere 2 was the whole earth under glass, a miniature model of Spaceship Earth. We were meant to understand that while the econauts sealed inside were LARPing a trip across our solar system, the rest of us were not players in a play. We really were on board a ship, eight-thousand miles across and traveling at sixty thousand miles an hour around the sun – and the idiot lights on the life support system were, and still are, blinking red. B2 was a mammoth piece of engineering which embodied a philosophy, a point of view, a warning. And now? While B2 had been made scientifically useful, we all saw what was lost, too. Biosphere 2 has lost much of its original poetry and, with that, has largely fallen out of the conversation.
So, the question came back to us. How do we ensure the Clock of the Long Now doesn't suffer a similar fate?
A pilot flying a small plane in South Africa with four passengers aboard felt a "cold sensation … underneath my shirt at my hip area," and thought it was a leaky water bottle. Until he glanced to his left and saw a venomous cobra head making its way underneath his seat. — Read the rest
Just because a company — like, say, Tesla — promises that your privacy "is and will always be enormously important to us," doesn't mean your privacy is important to them. Nor does it mean your privacy will be protected. Where there's a camera, there's a way — to invade your privacy, that is. — Read the rest
Rebecca Lawrence discusses how connections across all aspects of the system are needed for open research to flourish and deliver upon its promise.
The post Guest Post — Why Interoperability Matters for Open Research – And More than Ever appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
“If you are a car owner, you are red meat for whoever wants to prey upon you, whether it is police, auto lenders, or state agencies.”
The post Car Creditocracy: An Interview with Julie Livingston & Andrew Ross appeared first on Public Books.
Wiley's Jay Flynn discusses the impact that paper mills had on Hindawi's publishing program and how all stakeholders must collaborate to address behaviors that undermine research integrity.
The post Guest Post — Addressing Paper Mills and a Way Forward for Journal Security appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
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